Browsed byCategory: News you can use

Due to a quirk of deadlines and contracts, I have four new pieces of fiction out this month. Here they are: “A Stopped Clock” in The Atlantic Council’s War Stories from the Future. This is about smart cities and the future of urban warfare, as narrated by a middle-aged street vendor in Korea with an unspoken crush on her co-worker. This story will also appear in Gardner Dozois’ Year’s Best 33, which is very flattering. “Be Seeing You” in Pwning…

That’s right, agents. We’re open for business. David Nickle and Madeline Ashby are co-editing Licence Expired: the Unauthorized James Bond for ChiZine Publications, seeking stories based on the character of James Bond as described in Ian Fleming’s fourteen published works. The anthology will be published by ChiZine Publications in Canada only, as Fleming’s work has entered the public domain only in Canada and a few other countries. Because of those legal restrictions, stories must only reference elements from Fleming’s stories,…

It’s true! Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels and short stories are now public domain in Canada. When I heard this, I immediately asked my Twitter followers if I should write a James Bond novel. (Response was enthusiastic.) The thing is, I’ve already sort of written one — my second novel, iD: The Second Machine Dynasty, drew a great deal of inspiration from Fleming’s work. It’s a fast, brutal, pulpy adventure story about an Hispanic self-replicating humanoid trying to find a…

Yes, it’s true. Company Town has been acquired by Tor Books. Angry Robot will no longer be publishing it. I explain how this happened at io9: Ashby tells io9 that her editor had left Angry Robot before editing Company Town, and meanwhile the book was delayed — so she informed the authors who were blurbing it that there was no rush, after all. One of those would-be blurbers offered to show the book to his editor at Tor instead, and…

Dave and I are in Washington DC for the World Fantasy convention, and among the places we’ve visited in town is the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum. It’s an awesome place, with scale reproductions of spacefaring vessels, artifacts from past missions, and exhibits on everything from celestial navigation to the spectroscopy. While there, we kept seeing posters for IMAX screenings of Interstellar, which we thought we’d have to catch after returning to Toronto. “Wait,” I asked. “Is Interstellar playing…here?” And…

Good question. Glad you asked. If you pre-ordered the book, know two things: a) I’m ever so grateful, and b) it won’t arrive on time. Why is that? My fellow Angry Robot author Kameron Hurley explains it succinctly: So back in June Angry Robot Books, publisher of THE MIRROR EMPIRE, closed its ancillary imprints, Exhibit A and Strange Chemistry. This was part of a wider cost-cutting exercise initiated by Osprey, Angry Robot’s parent company, which was going up for…

In addition to the Hieroglyph anthology events I’m doing in NYC and DC this month, I’ll also be at Bakka-Phoenix Books in Toronto this Saturday, the 13th, at 3pm to launch the book locally with my pal and fellow contributor Karl Schroeder. The book actually comes out tomorrow, 9 September, so there will be plenty of copies if you’d like them signed. If you’d like to read more about the anthology, check out this BBC piece on the subject: Konstantinou…

Last year, I was nominated for a Campbell Award, for my debut novel vN. Then I declined the nomination, because I realized I wasn’t truly eligible for the award that year. Why? Because I’d already made a sale to Nature magazine. SFWA treats Nature as a Campbell-qualifying market, which means my “Campbell clock” (which I imagine looking like the glowing crystal in Logan’s Run) has been running since 2009.

This Black Friday marks the advent of SFContario 4, where I will be a panelist (among many others). Here is my schedule, for anyone who may be interested. Saturday, 11:00am, Ballroom BC: “No, I’m Hero Support.” Good sidekicks aren’t just ciphers. They have back-stories that may be as rich as the main character’s. A good sidekick does more than point, ask questions, and scream. Our panelists discuss what goes into creating a good companion or sidekick. (I’ll probably spend this…

Recently, Angry Robot announced something I’ve known about for quite a while now: I’m writing a book called Company Town, set apart from the Machine Dynasty series. It’s about an escorts’ escort named Hwa, who takes a job bodyguarding the young heir to a family-run corporate energy empire, just as that empire colonizes Hwa’s hometown: a floating city of Slocum towers built around an oil rig 500 km northeast of St. John’s, Newfoundland. Taking the job means quitting her gig…

Madeline Ashby has worked with Intel Labs, the Institute for the Future, SciFutures, Nesta, Data & Society, The Atlantic Council, the ASU Center for Science and the Imagination, Changeist, and others. She has spoken at SXSW, FutureEverything, MozFest, and other events. Her essays have appeared at BoingBoing, io9, WorldChanging, Creators Project, Arcfinity, MISC Magazine, and FutureNow. Her fiction has appeared in Slate, MIT Tech Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of the Machine Dynasty novels. Her novel Company Town was a Canada Reads finalist.